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Information, news articles & comment on quality and private educationFri, 17 Nov 2017 11:01:59 +0000en-US
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1 Big business moves into schools down underhttps://www.ieducation.co.za/big-business-moves-into-schools-down-under/
https://www.ieducation.co.za/big-business-moves-into-schools-down-under/#respondFri, 17 Nov 2017 11:01:59 +0000https://www.ieducation.co.za/?p=6421In July 2017, the conference of the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation which represents the rights of over 70 000 teachers in New South Wales was held at the International Convention Centre in Sydney, Australia.
On day three of the conference, a controversial study, entitled “Commercialisation in Public Schooling (CIP): An Australian Study”, was released to delegates. The study reveals just how much education technology (EdTech) companies are benefiting financially from data they acquire from schools. Greg Thompson, associate professor of education research at the Queensland University of Technology and one of the co-authors of the study, said that it had involved the participation of thousands of teachers and school leaders across Australia.
Thompson’s team found out that 74% of these respondents were deeply concerned that allowing data about students into commercial hands was unethical. Half of all respondents were worried that commercial trends were dictating education policy, and a significant group was concerned that schools were now paying for services traditionally supplied by the Department of Education. “There’s a really strong sense that commercialisation has no place in public schools,” said Thompson. Thompson asserted: “Both [school] testing and assessment and [student academic progress] data analysis and integration are identified as key growth areas for the EdTech industry in
the coming years.” By way of example, Thompson referred to the Australian National Schools Interoperability
Programme (NSIP), a joint initiative of Australian state, territory and federal ministers for education. The initiative has issued schools with a list of standardised software and dataset products to be used. The list includes 13
commercial vendors, including assessment and reporting software, cloud-based student identity management, learning apps and learning platforms. The CIP report predicts that the needs and functions of schools over the next three to five years “will be subtly shaped by the provision of software”.
]]>https://www.ieducation.co.za/big-business-moves-into-schools-down-under/feed/0Going big to catch a betrayerhttps://www.ieducation.co.za/going-big-to-catch-a-betrayer/
https://www.ieducation.co.za/going-big-to-catch-a-betrayer/#respondFri, 17 Nov 2017 10:59:31 +0000https://www.ieducation.co.za/?p=6419The story of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who hid with her family from the Nazis in Amsterdam in
the Netherlands during World War 2 and documented her short life in a diary, has fascinated generations of
readers. The fact that the Franks were betrayed and sent to the death camps in 1944 is a compelling part of the
story, as noone has been able to prove who disclosed their secret annexe. A retired American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent now says he can prove who the traitor was. Vince Pankoke will lead a team of investigators
comprising historians, psychological profilers and police detectives. Used to tracking Colombian drug gangs in the past, Pankoke and his team of 20 will now turn to big data to crack the case. Wikipedia defines the term “big data” as “[data] sets that are so large or complex that traditional processing application software is inadequate to deal with them. Big data challenges include capturing data, data storage, data analysis, searching, sharing, transferring, visualisation, querying, updating and information privacy.” On https://www.coldcasediary.com, Pankoke has set 4 August 2019 as the date for the big reveal. This will be the 75th anniversary of the arrest of the Frank family by the Germans in their secret hiding place. Pankoke has said the team is already dealing with over a million documents that are being incorporated into a huge database, which also includes lists of Nazi informants, lists of
Jews who were turned over to the authorities, names of Gestapo agents who lived in Amsterdam during the war, police records and recently declassified wartime documents that were stored in the US. The database is so big, said Pankoke at a recent media briefing, that “[a] human in their lifetime might not be able to review it”.
Pankoke’s team is also being assisted by the Dutch big data technology firm, Xomnia. The Anne Frank House in
Amsterdam, a museum dedicated to the young writer and caretaker of precious related artefacts, will also be part of the investigation.
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